Five hundred seventy-five: That’s how many US soldiers have lost their lives in the Afghanistan war since Barack Obama became president at noon on January 20, 2009, according to the icasualties.org web site, which tracks US soldiers’ deaths using reports received from the Department of Defense – and which is widely cited in the media as a source of information on US deaths.
According to the same web site, 575 is also the number of US soldiers who lost their lives in the Afghanistan war during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Therefore, total US deaths in Afghanistan have doubled in Afghanistan under President Obama, and when the next US soldier is reported dead, the majority of US deaths in Afghanistan will have occurred under President Obama.
This grim landmark should be reported in the media, and White House reporters should ask Robert Gibbs to comment on it. It is quite relevant to Gibbs’ implicit attempt to marginalize critics of the war in Afghanistan by claiming that they wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than the abolition of the Pentagon. The majority of Americans – including the overwhelming majority of Democrats and at least 60 percent of House Democrats – are deeply skeptical of the administration’s Afghanistan policy not because they are knee-jerk pacifists – obviously they are not – but because the human and financial cost of the war is rising, we have nothing to show for the increased cost and the administration has not articulated a clear plan to reach the endgame; indeed, administration officials, led by General Petraeus, have just launched a public relations campaign to undermine the substantial drawdown in troops next summer that Democratic leaders in Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said that they expect.
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This grim landmark is not reported directly by the icasualties.org web site – you have to have to go to the right places on the web site to retrieve the data and then calculate it from the data given. The data retrieval and arithmetic is straightforward, but I will carefully explain it here so that any reader – and particular any reporter and news editor – can easily reproduce it.
The top-level organization of the icasualties.org web site is divided into two parts, according to the designations previously given to the “two wars” by the Department of Defense: “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The latter designation includes not just US deaths in Afghanistan, but also non-Iraq US deaths in the conflicts formerly known collectively as the “Global War on Terror”; for example, it includes deaths in the Philippines and Djibouti, far away from Afghanistan.
But you can find in the database US deaths in Afghanistan since 2001 by year and month by first going to this link and then, underneath the table that initially appears under “Fatalities by Year and Month,” choosing in the pop-up menus “US” for nationality, “All Fatalities” for Fatality Type and “Afghanistan Only” for Theatre.
You should then see a table that looks like this (view as web page) (download excel spread sheet).
As shown beneath the table, when you sum the yearly totals you get:
Total: 1150
2001-2008: 564
2009-2010: 586
But this wouldn’t give the right figures for Bush and Obama, because it would allocate all of January 2009 to Obama, when he was only president from noon on January 20.
Subtracting the 14 deaths of January 2009 from the total for 2009-10 gives:
2001-2008: 564
2009-2010 (not counting 1/09): 572
You can find the daily data for January 2009 by going to this link: Scrolling down to January 2009, of the 14 deaths in Afghanistan (there was a January 30 death in Djibouti), 11 took place before January 20 and three took place after January 20.
Adding 11 to 564 and 3 to 572 gives:
Totals:
Bush: 575
Obama: 575
News media generally like landmarks as a way to visit and explain the US death toll from the wars.
This landmark is surely a worthy candidate for consideration.
I expect Robert Gibbs to be asked about it.
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